Friday, August 24, 2012

Guilty Pleasures: A Blog Series

"Confound it all I love it though--Jack Skellington

Guilty pleasures: we all have them, and however much they may come down to class issues and the environment we grew up in, a lot of people still want to hide them because they want to establish a reputation with others. No one has impeccable taste, but most people want to
create a good self-image, so we hide our little "lapses".

It's hard to define what makes a "guilty pleasure", and it's different for everyone. In my case there are two main kinds of guilty pleasures. One: a work you enjoy has a certain amount of content that you disagree with morally, or is of a certain low level of quality, so that you become uncomfortable about admitting you like it. The exact ratio is hard to define. There are some things I like that could be guilty pleasures, but I find enough in them to counterbalance the feelings of disagreement and/or bad quality.

The second, rarer kind is when you take only a mild or completely justifiable pleasure in something, but you let yourself be shamed into staying silent because you see so many people you respect criticizing it and you don't have a very strong defence in place.

Considering how much vapid children's entertainment I also take in, this blogging series should be a lot longer than it is, but there is room to add more as needed. Some of these things I've admitted to before, others less often, or are entirely new. This is also an arbitrary list, with order being meaningless.